Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Robert, how do we know your "modernization" is correct? That's part of the problem. If you get it wrong, you can change the meaning of the author.
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How do you know this about any edition, digital or print, that isn't a facsimile copy of the first edition? Until very recently, new editions have always been made by manually re-typesetting the text, with intentional and unintentional changes creeping in.
All editing has to be done carefully, but modernizing orthography will rarely risk changing the meaning, particularly since in English only few words are spelled differently now than they were in the 18th or 19th century. Punctuation can be more challenging, and when you look at 19th century print editions you can find commas strewn across the text as if they'd been distributed with a salt shaker (and no, I'm not talking about specks in the paper turning into phantom OCR punctuation). Most corrections of all kinds of obvious errors will hopefully not go against the author's intentions, but I fully agree, each "error" has to be checked against the possibility that it had been intentional, and if in doubt, the correction should be documented.
For reference I use the oldest print edition that I can lay my eyes on, but admittedly I search for scanned copies on the Internet and do not buy rare first editions from antique books sellers, nor do I search for them in libraries. Someone might be able to do a better job than I'm doing, but then, they'd probably ask to be paid for their efforts, or might limit their work to a smaller number of books.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
A compromise would be to put out two versions. One as it was published and the other your version and let the reader decide which one to read.
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But this is something that the reader can already do - not that they need me to tell them, but on my website I have links to Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource, The Online Books Page, Librivox, and the MobileRead Forum (all of which are far better known than my site, anyway) - there they can easily find different editions, which they may prefer to read. I'm not depriving anyone of their choice.